America’s Leaders Need to Tell a New Story About Infrastructure

Narratives are powerful leadership tools. By reframing and redefining the narrative, leaders can craft a vision to stimulate new actions. This kind of leadership communication is sorely needed now to get moving on America’s infrastructure problems.

Repairing America’s deteriorating infrastructure – crumbling bridges, congested highways, outmoded airports and train tracks, crowded runways – is important, but not enough. Transportation infrastructure must be renewed and reinvented. Systems conceived and built 50-60 years ago should be reimagined for the 20th century, whether high speed trains, innovative public transit, or technology-enabled roads and vehicles that tap the potential of sensors, smartphones, wireless networks, and Big Data for greener, cleaner, more efficient mobility. This could usher in an era of accelerated growth, with a renewed sense of national purpose and shared prosperity.

Infrastructure has no ideology or party; bridges can collapse in red states as readily as in blue states. A new narrative could show how past infrastructure investments created opportunity. A new vision could look beyond maintenance to investments that build communities, create a foundation for the nation’s future, and spur economic growth. That growth could in turn generate trillions more in returns while improving opportunity and quality of life. Framing it that way would put in perspective the trillions of dollars the OECD and the American Society of Civil Engineers say is required to put American back in the lead.

To mobilize public support for new investment, leaders must change the conversation to align diverse interests and emphasize cross-sector partnerships, region by region. Technology entrepreneurs should be at the table with established companies, elected officials, financiers, and consumers. Citizen voices and votes can encourage action.

The state of transportation infrastructure has implications for every major issue. It affects health: the risk of injury or death, the quality of air, or how quickly first responders can reach people in an emergency. It touches education: the time required to get to a good school and the impact on student learning of spending hours in transit. It accounts for whether people have access to jobs, or whether employees waste unnecessary hours sitting in traffic jams. Problems from port delays to parking shortages affect businesses’ ability to compete. It touches the environment: transportation accounts for more than a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. And it has a bearing on poverty and inequality: low-income people are stuck in areas with fewer options to get to jobs, get affordable groceries, or have choices for health care and schools.

In the past, the infrastructure investment story was about defense; building the Interstate Highway System and accelerating aviation expenditures post-Sputnik were justified as necessary to national security. These days, leaders should tell a story about mobility: how physical mobility shapes social mobility, and why mobility is opportunity for individuals, families, businesses, and communities. In addition to construction jobs, the technology side of infrastructure offers jobs of the future. There will be fewer toll collectors or taxi dispatchers, but more data scientists and programmers. The U.S. Department of Transportation has developed technical training programs and STEM-focused secondary schools. There needs to be more of this.

Transportation is the ultimate connector, yet it is often discussed in silos, industry by industry, one mode of transportation at a time, with the private sector separated from public policy. At a time when major institutions understand the value of operating as one seamless enterprise, it’s time to upgrade the vision of One America. Mobility issues are of a piece and part of a connected system, even if it is connected less than optimally, e.g., in places where trains don’t stop at airports. Talking about the issues together means including the whole spectrum of actors and stakeholders in national and regional coalitions.

Users do not care how they (or their goods) go from A to B; they just want to get there quickly, safely, and cost-effectively. Multi-modal systems powered by data and transparency are a compelling goal that can get people excited and make the case for investment. For example, technology could enable one ticket to move from buses to rail to air, perhaps a smartphone barcode accompanied by data to coordinate schedule.

While Congress is stuck in gridlock, leadership is active region by region, as I found in research for my book Move. But regions cross boundaries of cities and states, and they still rely on federal grants for small and large projects; federal air quality mitigation grants helped pay for bicycle-friendly improvements in Chicago; other federal grants supplemented railroads’ own money to upgrade tracks. Private investors can enter into partnerships with the public sector, but they can’t carry the weight alone, and they are more likely to invest where there is committed leadership.

A new narrative need not abandon what exists — suburbia is still growing, and people love their cars — but leaders can shift the emphasis, e.g., to city-friendly policies, rail in the equation with roads, encouragement for tech entrepreneurs, and coordination across narrow silos. By crafting a new narrative, leaders can rally people around a common cause and unlock the potential of infrastructure investment.

Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series of pieces marking Infrastructure Week 2015 that will explore the role of leadership in fixing U.S. infrastructure problems. Read parts one, two, three, and four.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s latest book is MOVE: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead. She is a professor at Harvard Business School and chair and director of the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter @RosabethKanter.